Recently, there has been a proliferation in the field of wireless communications. Portable electronic devices such as cordless and cellular telephones, pagers, wireless modems, wireless email devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs) with communication functions, and other portable electronic devices are becoming commonplace. Many of these portable electronic devices are configured for packet data communication, for example, push to talk (PTT) communications or Internet communications. One example of a packet data communications is General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). GPRS is a radio technology for global system for mobile communications (GSM) networks that adds packet-switching protocols to the GSM networks.
Conventional portable electronic devices configured for GPRS packet data communications typically automatically attach to the network upon power up of the portable electronic device. In many instances, the portable electronic devices automatically attach, though a small percentage of users of these devices actually exploit the packet data capability of the devices. Thus, network resources are being occupied by devices that may rarely, if ever, use the packet data capability of the portable electronic device, limiting traffic on the network. Some mobile network providers have expressed concern with automatic attachment to the network upon power up for these reasons. One solution considered is to disable the auto-attach parameter of the portable electronic device, however, this would negatively affect users that actually use the packet data capabilities due to the delay involved each time the portable electronic device attaches to the network. Accordingly, improved portable electronic devices and related methods may be desired.